


Ner Jupayr Alorir Ni Staabi At Gar «My Path Leads Me Right To You»

by ProwlingThunder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Clones (Star Wars), Gen, M/M, Shared Dreams, shared moments, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 01:03:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: “I’m sorry.”“Yes,” says Obi-wan, softly, and ink stains the leaves. CC-2224 raises the muzzle again as Obi-wan lifts his hand. “So am I.”





	Ner Jupayr Alorir Ni Staabi At Gar «My Path Leads Me Right To You»

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BadWolfGirl01](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolfGirl01/gifts).



_ "Commander Cody,” _ says the Chancellor, and it feels cold and slick, like oil trying to coil around his mind; he’s never really liked him and he’s never had a reason to dislike him, it’s just a feeling of discomfort, and Cody can work with people he dislikes. It’s not that hard. It’s so, so easy when the Chancellor is so far away, actually, and there’s a reason he likes being deployed that has nothing to do with General Obi-wan. It’s going to be difficult when the war stops--  _ “The time has come. Execute Order 66.” _

CC-2224 salutes, exits the comm, and--

It seeps into him and curls around his brain, soaks in; he sets his finger on the trigger of his blaster--

  
  


In holonet books, the nuance of a soulmate is a tricky thing. Different races experience it differently. In his private padd, CC-2224 has three and an extensive note cum argument from CT-4567 about the different renditions of it across the racial spectrum, thoughts about how differentiating soulmates works across species barriers, theories as to how it might be presented.

Some races are branded. Some hear the voices of their future souls, or share dreams with them, some have patches of flesh. Twi’lek’s, for instance, according to the books, a whole portion of their arm will change colors to that of their soulmate, and they can write on it or feel touch against it, sometimes.

CC-2224 is on the officer track and knows variations like this end up with serious reprimand, sometimes, but defends himself to the instructors on the grounds that all variations of sending coded messages must be explored by the officers, and the more nonsensical or confused their enemy is about what they are discussing, the more successful it is likely to be. They permit this with the general indulgence CC-2224 has seen them give to officers-to-be, with the air of vague interest, and honestly CC-2224 is more confused about that than about any of CT-4567’s notes about why the authors’ assumptions of cross-species biology would vary itself so significantly so as to make up for a soulmark.

 

CC-2224’s arm never turns orange, thankfully, and the curl of soft colors around his wrist is easily hidden beneath his blacks, a thing only quitely noted by the proctor during basic physicals. But there’s nothing in any of the ridiculous books about the quiet gentle lull in his mind or the pull of righteousness in his breast.

He would know. He’s read all of them.

They do, actually, make pretty decent tools to confuse the enemy in the simulations, however, so they’re permitted more of them to go around.

None of those prove to make any more sense than the originals.

  
  


Warmth nudges against him, little roots of green inside his mind with tiny, flowering buds. It settles against the ichor, taking root, supping it all up. CC-2224 can almost feel it, the sensation of it as he marches forward, alien and unfamiliar and familiar and welcome all, and he resists--

Grabs hold--

The traitor Jedi Kenobi turns to face him, a warm smile on his lips and light in his eyes and CC-2224 curls his finger around the trigger--

“Commander Cody?”

_ Stop. Stop! _

\--staggers, head throbbing, an ache behind his eyeballs. The slime is there and cold as ice and he holds onto the vague sense of kinetic warmth, the idea of fresh growing things, and tries to focus. Obi-wan’s smile slips into a concerned frown. “Cody?”

“General--” It hurts to breathe, but he’s not a brother, he wouldn’t understand unless Cody  _ spoke _ to him. The throbbing didn’t abate, only intensified, and in the eddies of his mind he felt flowers bloom, petals brother-white. “I have orders to kill you,” and he hated the expression on Obi-wan’s face, the way it crumbled, saddened, comprehension a quiet, terrible thing, he’s learned to read the other’s face so well that it guts him to see it.

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” says Obi-wan, softly, and ink stains the leaves. CC-2224 raises the muzzle again as Obi-wan lifts his hand. “So am I.”

  
  


He has felt it ever since he can remember, the soft suffusion of life, of warmth. He never had anything to liken it to until he was more advanced, doing exterior drills for the first time under a Kamino storm. A flash of lightning had struck nearby on one of the docks, and in the moment between the crash and the subsequent fire it had caused, the air had been clean and crisp and empty. Open and ready and waiting for something to feel it, the same way the  _ feel _ has always been there.

It has no identity, the sense, and without something to name it CC-2224 can hardly investigate it. But sometimes during battle, later, he can feel it, a twist of awareness, and sometimes he can react before his brother falls and sometimes he cannot.

 

He always knows who’ve they’ve lost before his 2IC gives him the accounting.

It doesn’t make it any easier to read off the roster, to tell others who they had lost, but it left him numb when the battles were over. Droids didn’t leave behind the same emptiness a lost brother did, didn’t ache like a limb lost. He never felt like he could still reach out and touch a downed droid, if only he wanted to, but he felt he would turn and find CT-7734 nearby, some days.

 

CC-2224 had felt it when CT-7734 fell, and knew him lost, with the same sense that he could feel the fall of numerous others, down and down and down, soft little flames snuffed out in the ozone.

But CT-7734 fell worlds and stars and systems away from him, and that was when Cody knew something was wrong.

 

But of course, it was just a thing he dealt with and ignored, on Kamino, the same way he dealt with and ignored the swirl cuffing his wrist, soft browns and greens and blues with little tongues breaking up the shape.

Sometimes, if he looks, he thinks he can see the outline of a shape, a rose-star on his right pulse, but if he looks, CC-2224 doesn’t admit it, because he is ignoring this.

  
  


He wakes on a small transport, a ship barely big enough for one person. There’s not really enough space to even get up and move, which is a good thing, Cody decides, because Obi-wan is in the pilot’s seat. As soon as he sees him, the chill wraps around his brainstem again and tries to strangle all that he is.

“Sir--” he manages, and he can smell blood.

Obi-wan twists in his seat and glances at him, smiles a little. “How are you feeling, commander?”

CC-2227’s hands are bound together before him by a length of rough brown, the color and cloth painfully familiar. It’s a Jedi’s wrap. He lurches forward.

Obi-wan reaches back and rests his fingers over his bared face-- “Easy now, Cody. Just rest a while.” --and darkness draws him into a warmth that makes his skin tingle. 

 

He dreams of awful things, CC-2227. He dreams of raising his blaster against his commanding officer, his Jedi, his general. Dreams of feeling nothing as the light in blue eyes dies. Dreams of going to collect the lightsaber from his hands and spotting a flash of white and orange on his wrist, pushing up a sleeve to reveal it. Finding, in the hands of the Force, a splash of color and a shape so familiar he’d know it anywhere. 

Those dreams end in agony, save for when a familiar voice shushes him, a familiar hand on his temple, touches gentle and sure and he knows he’s safe, when it happens, that nothing bad can happen when they’re near.

 

He dreams of other things, too, in the black just shy of rest. Dead brothers and dead Jedi younglings, not little brothers, not Cadets. A recall message set on loop and finally disabled, set to lead those listening into a trap. He dreams of the Senator’s distressed face and General Skywalker--  _ you were my brother. I loved you. I loved you. _

He dreams of oppressive smoke and heat and a chasm of loss and the drawing pit of cold and he knows it’s not him at all, knows it isn’t really a dream,  _ va draar a vercopa, k'oyacyi ner tyatr, oyacyir par ni, ni malyasa'yr olaror. _

 

He dreams of white inside the black, flashes of silver and pale masks and his wrist is so cold it  _ burns _ commander cody  _ execute order 66 _ commander cody  _ put him back under we’re not done-- _

 

He wakes up later and the world feels very light and fuzzy and  _ is _ very bright and not fuzzy at all. Cody groans in an entirely unsoldierly way and tries to bury himself back under the pillow. He feels… exposed, honestly, in medical. And he certainly has to be in medical, stripped down past his blacks as he is.

Not a clone medical facility though, he thinks. There’s not a band of cloth around his wrist, hiding the  _ karhr. _ His brothers don’t mind to see it, and he doesn’t mind to show them, but all of them know it’s an aberration. Maybe it’s not something that gets him recycled, but it’s still not a good thing, and the Kamino don’t like to see  _ karhr  _ if it can be avoided. CC-2227 has worn it nearly his whole life. It’s  _ strange _ to be without it.

But the haircut he could feel wasn’t that abnormal, exactly. The GAR had certain standards they let them individualize their bodies-- far easier to individualize their armors, but they tried-- yet there were still only so many haircuts one could have before a mane no longer fit in a helmet. He should know. Convincing Obi-wan a haircut might be in order had taken a lot of careful negotiation of his position. Every once in a while, it did the men good to have their general in uniform.

“You’re making my ears burn, commander.”

He tensed in preparation for the viscus slick, but after one, two heartbeats, three, and it didn’t come, he forced himself to breathe out and pry his eyelids open, peering from beneath too-bright pillow. He felt foolishly young, like a new cadet, but.. “General Kenobi.”

Obi-wan has divested himself of his cloak and lightsaber, as far as Cody can tell, and his tabard looked like it could use another round in the laundry, but he looked  _ clean, _ at least. If tired. Cody could almost feel the fatigue himself, radiating through aching limbs and a slow stinging pain behind his eye, the way Obi-wan always got when the battles started to drag on too long and he couldn’t bring it in himself to rest. Times like these, Cody would pick up as many threads as he could to keep them from landing in Obi-wan’s hands, but that hadn’t always been particularly effective.

That sleeve needed mending. Cody could see the frayed white and orange of his pale-blacks.

“I think we’re a little past the ‘General’ stage,” the Jedi told him, stepping further into the room. Cody let himself look at it a little further. Only a small handful of personal touches, made to look more like a long-term habitation than anything else. Still medical-white, though, because some things were genetically universal through every race, he guessed. Aside from the bed he laid in, there was a chair and a secured table and set of cabinetry for clothes and supplies. It was a big bed, too. If he didn’t know any better, he wouldn’t have been able to place it as medical. “But so far even General is a step in the right direction. I’ll take what I can get. How do you feel?”

“Am I supposed to be feeling badly?” he wonders. Takes stock of himself as best he can. Fives and CT-4567 and the other GAR medics were always so much better at that, Cody’d never really had time. But as far as he can tell, he’s in fighting form. Sure, the hair-cut is irritating, shorn uncomfortably short, but it will pass.

“No,” Obi-wan promised. Cody frowned at him a little. Obi-wan speak for  _ yes _ usually came out sounding like  _ no, _ to him, and Cody had stopped believing it about the second week under his command. “You had a bit of a surgery and I’ve been assured it was as non-invasive as they could possibly make it given the circumstances.”

“Surgery,” he repeated, thinking of the icy claws curling around his mind. Around logical thinking. “Something in my head?”

“Ah. Yes.”

Obi-wan looks desperately uncomfortable at the idea of elaborating. Cody decides to let him get away with not, for the time being. Decides not to ask. “I feel fine.” A heartbeat: “Chancellor Palpatine ordered Order 66. The Jedi are in danger.”

If anything, the alert makes Obi-wan look even  _ more _ sad, more tired.

Cody remembers the taste of smoke and covers his wrist with one hand. “...it’s too late, isn’t it, sir.”

“I’m afraid so. I’ll give you a full briefing when you’re ready for it.”

“I’m ready now, general.”

“Very well. Don’t get up, will you? I could sit for a while.”

 

“I’m being sent into hiding,” Obi-wan tells him roughly an hour later, after... After everything. Cody can name the feeling now, feel the  _ ache, _ the yawning emptiness where the most powerful bastions of the Force no longer exist. It’s impossible not to shiver; it chases its way through his spine and across radial nerves, and he grips his covers. It’s a weird and baffling behavior he has no context for except that it’s something he’s seen Obi-wan do. He doesn’t know why Obi-wan does it. “No one has made any choices about you, except that it is unlikely to be safe to return to the 212--”

“I’m going with you.”

“Cody,” and it hurts, to hear his name on Obi-wan’s tongue that way, the tone  _ no, not this time, _ but no, no, not this time. He thinks he understands it now. He thinks he understands what the feeling is, finally. And there’s the other thing, too. “You can’t.”

“General, I’m going,” he says instead, firm. Locks brown eyes with storm-blue and frowns. “Wherever you go, I’m going with you. I was bred to obey the Republic. I was born to follow  _ you.” _

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

_ I’m marked, _ he doesn’t say.  _ A part of me is a part of you, _ he can’t explain, doesn’t have those words. He doesn’t tell him about the dreams, things the elder man has confirmed unknowingly. Cody saw him fight General Skywalker. He was  _ there. _

Instead he shoves the  _ karhr _ at him, pulse-up, so that Obi-wan can see for himself.

He hasn’t thought of him as  _ General Kenobi _ in his private thoughts for… well. Three years now. Since the moment he’d first laid eyes on him, honestly. He’d tried, of course, but it just hadn’t..

Well, he’d reread those books CT-4567 had made notations all over and figured that much out, at least. 

“Very well then. Let us both learn how to hate the desert.”

 

It was gratifying, in ways Cody didn’t fully understand, for Obi-wan to rub his thumb over the pulse.

  
  


“By the way, sir,”

“You’re going to have to stop calling me that when we get there, Cody.”

“Yes sir.”

“You were saying?”

“There were aberrations among the Fett clones.”

“Aberrations,” Obi-wan repeated weakly, holding the young infant General Skywalker in his arms. Cody had offered to hold the boy longer, but it did strange things to Obi-wan’s expression if he let go of the child for more than a few minutes at the time, so Cody had regulated himself to making sure they got where they were going.

“Yes sir.”

“What sort of aberrations?”

“Potential force sensitivity.”

“Ah.” And then: “Well, that explains why your bloodwork came back the way it did.”

“Sir?”

“We’ll get started on your training after we find a house.”

  
  


Obi-wan shows him the mark on his wrist, eventually. Cody supposes he knew, ever since the Supreme Commander gave out his orders, but it’s still  _ odd _ to see Obi-wan’s arm bared for him, and odd to run his thumb over a pulse-point that bares his Face. It’s never not going to be odd, he thinks.

They’re tangled together naked and it’s the most ridiculously vulnerable intimate thing Cody can think of,  _ karhr _ exposed in the dying light of Tatooine’s twin suns, swirls of color hooking them together like cuffs.

“Still can’t believe you knew the whole time.”

“I don’t let just  _ anyone _ carry my lightsaber, Cody.”

“You kept losing it.”

“Yeah,” Obi-wan agreed. Pressed a gentle kiss to his temple. Beneath his eye. At the corner of his mouth, as if he could kiss away the very judging frown Cody was trying to use to impress the seriousness of  _ you kept losing your weapon _ onto him. It wasn’t working particularly well. “I knew my life was safe in your hands.”

It’s confessions like these that Cody can’t get enough of, even though they embarrass and confuse him. There’s guilt there, too, a little. He’d tried to  _ shoot him. _ He very nearly did shoot him! Orders or not, he can’t believe he turned his weapon on his  _ general. _

But a lightsaber, Obi-wan had explained, was a Jedi’s  _ life. _ There was a metaphorical layer to it that couldn’t be nuanced in words; Obi-wan had taken him into a trance to let him feel it the way he felt it, and Cody still wasn’t sure he had managed to understand it right. But the gist was understandable: a Jedi’s lightsaber was about the same as a brother’s Face.

That’s why both of them were carefully stored in a basket in the back of the house. A part of their lives quietly hidden away, waiting to be unearthed again when wooden swords would be traded in for lightsabers and blasters.

“What I don’t understand is the star, actually,” he says, pressing his fingers against the pulse-point.

Cody smothers a laugh on desert-tanning skin. “Don’t worry. That one  _ I _ got.”

**Author's Note:**

> karhr - "mark" in this case, referencing a physical mark a soulmate leaves on skin, in human or near-human genetics.  
> va draar a vercopa - "not never a dream", utilizing double negatives for emphasis  
> k'oyacyi - "Stay alive!" A literal order in Mando'a.  
> ner tyatr - "my star"  
> oyacyir par ni - "live for me"  
> ni malyasa'yr olaror - "I will come"


End file.
